


more than a vision of you

by meritmut



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alderaan, Angst and Humor, Date night for star-crossed space soulmates, Emotional Baggage, F/M, Feelings, Fluff and Humor, Innuendo, Light Angst, Romance, Sexual Content, Sexual Humor, Tea, appalling sex jokes, loudly implied cunnilingus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-03
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-21 11:03:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15556299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: There’s a place on Kafrene station, tucked away in the back streets of the Kassiani district behind the Triodion fuel depot, hidden between a boarded-up spice den and the patchwork awnings of a Twi’lek-owned pawn shop.It’s the kind of place one might go to disappear for a little while.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thewayofthetrashcompactor (BriarLily)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BriarLily/gifts).



> 'cause tonight we'll have no need to dream  
> i'll make you see in a new light  
> it only happens when you're here next to me  
> — jessie ware, 'stay awake, wait for me'
> 
> mucho love to mnemehoshiko, pythia and aionimica for the extra eyes

There’s a place on Kafrene station, tucked away in the back streets of the Kassiani district behind the Triodion fuel depot, hidden between a boarded-up spice den and the patchwork awnings of a Twi’lek-owned pawn shop. It’s a narrow, cramped, dim-lit hole in the wall, marked only by the faded outline of a painted flower over the door; you could walk right past it and never even suspect it was there. The worn-down cobbles underfoot and mismatched walls at either side indicate it was once just an alleyway itself, co-opted for use like every other sliver of square footage on the planetoid.

It’s the kind of place that can’t be found, unless one already knows where it is.

It’s the kind of place one might go to disappear for a little while.

Inside: a different world to the bustling warren of Kafrene’s streets. Past the threshold, the ammoniac reek of polluted air is replaced by the more appealing aromas of spiced food, sweet mu’assel and strong caf; the neon-streaked fog of the freighters’ district gives way to a soft suffusion of light cast by dozens—even hundreds—of jewel-coloured Alderaanian lanterns.

And everywhere, in every direction you look, can be found the same flower whose image sits painted above the lintel.

The longer you look, the more of them you see. Lush geometric meadows bloom out of the tiled walls; embroidered cushions and tapestries bear designs in all the colours of the sunset. Flowers—the real things—cascade out of alcoves and shelves and tables all around, their trailing greenery lending a clear sweetness to the perfumed air, as from the moment you cross the threshold of the tiny cantina the world comes alive with the colour and fragrance of gingerbells.

In a corner booth, tucked away from the few other patrons, Breha Organa’s grandson sits hunched over a cup of something dark and faintly smoking, the same shade as the eyes burning from beneath his hood.

He favours anonymity, and this is one of the few places in the galaxy he can find it.

Usually.

“Isn’t this place a little colourful for you?” Rey slips into the booth beside him, her eyes darting about the little cantina in unabashed curiosity. Ben lifts his head to observe her in silence as she settles back into the shadows he’s claimed for himself.

He should say something, probably. Even if there’s a significant chance it’ll be the wrong thing, and only piss her off, he should say _something._

“I didn’t hear you coming.”

Rey shrugs. “It’s noisy in here.”

It isn’t. Compared to the hustle and bustle outside it’s almost peaceful. The low hum of music and chatter filling the room exert a soporific pull on Ben’s fatigued mind, and even the distant rumble of the freighter yard through the ground beneath his feet is strangely soothing.

“Where are you?” he asks. She’s garbed for travelling, in a dark hooded jacket with a scarf wrapped around her neck, easy enough to pull up over her mouth and nose to keep from being noticed wherever she is. She’d be overheating, if she were really here, but then—that’s the thing, isn’t it?

Rey gives him a funny look, plainly thinking him mad to believe she would give away her location just like that. Maybe he is. Isn’t it a kind of madness to converse with shadows the way he does? To speak to visions and ghosts, and expect them to answer at all?

“What is this place?” She tips her head toward the room, tracing spirals into the worn lacquer of the table with her index finger.

“Mehru’s,” Ben supplies, watching the movement of her hand against the wood. It’s no longer a strange thing to witness Rey interacting with his surroundings when she isn’t really here, but there’s something _off_ about her presence tonight. She’s never felt this close before, this _solid._ He feels instinctively that if he were to reach out and touch her, she would be warm under his hands.

“It’s beautiful,” she says. “How did you find it?”

Ben looks away from her. As usual, she’s managed to steer the conversational speeder into treacherous waters without even trying. And in record time, too. “I came here once or twice, before.”

“Oh.”

She sounds subdued, and he can tell the turn her mind has taken. He knows this place from before—before Luke, before Snoke, before all of it. She knows of only one person who might have brought a young Ben Solo to a backstreet dive like this.

Blessedly, she does not voice those thoughts.

“You spend much of your childhood in bars?”

His mouth quirks bitterly. “No.” Curious to see if it will make her squirm, Ben finds himself volunteering the truth of his own volition. “I’m sure Solo wouldn’t have seen a problem in it, if he’d thought my mother would never find out, but it was her I came here with. An aunt brought us. It’s not a bar, not really.”

Rey peers around the room again, her eyes dancing with the light of the many-coloured lamps. “Looks like a bar to me.”

He swallows an acerbic remark about where she’d gained such a discerning eye, growing up in a wasteland as she did, and offers her his glass instead. “Try it.”

Rey eyes the little cup suspiciously, but the tempting scent drifting up from it (and the fact that he’d ordered it before she had appeared, so it’s unlikely to be something noxious) wins her over.

“What is it?” She takes a hesitant sip, her eyes widening at the warm, faintly-spiced sweetness that fills her throat and spreads outward through her chest. It’s not what she would have expected of him.

Ben accepts the glass back and takes a sip of his own. “Tea.”

For all its insalubrious surroundings, Mehru’s is and always has been a teashop, one of the last Alderaanian houses left in the galaxy. He tells her as much, and watches her take in the place with new eyes, soaking up the colours and the music and the soft hum of conversation with her customary hunger.

“I don’t know anything about Alderaan,” she admits at length. “Only what happened to it. Which...I don’t think counts.”

“Mehru built this place.” Ben gestures to the holo of a dark-eyed lady on the wall above the bar, her black hair streaked with grey. “She was born there, and her family still own it. A lot of the Remnant still come here—it is a place of memory, rather than mourning. Sometimes...you want to remember, without the grief that goes with it.”

Rey lets out a heavy breath, twisting her fingers together on the table. “Yeah.”

Memory needn’t always be a burden. It was here that Ben first learned that lesson, watching his mother and the other exiles honour their homeworld in a way that felt more like a celebration than a lament. It had grown harder to remember the lesson as time went on. He hasn’t been back here since he was a teenager, but the moment he’d stepped over the threshold the years had fallen away and it was as if no time at all had passed since he’d dozed off against Leia’s shoulder, the music of her homeworld filling his head with silver dreams.

Mehru’s granddaughter isn’t much older than he is, though time has been kinder to her than to Ben. Nur holds court from a chaise on the other side of the room, chatting with a few of her regulars and ensuring their cups are never empty.

She knows nothing of who he is now, what he has become. Here he is still the boy he was when he shared a pot of too-strong caf with his Aunt V and listened to songs she and his mother had sung when they were girls.

He doesn’t hate that boy as much as he used to, anymore.

Rey shifts at his side. She is uneasy; he can feel it, fluttering under his skin like insect wings, a tension in her shoulders that wasn’t there before. She is unsure of the space she occupies. She wants to fill the silence, but she does not know how.

Ben watches her fidget. He knows his explanation is responsible for the sudden change in her demeanour. He had intended it to be. He had _wanted_ to get under her armour.

Though now, he can’t actually remember why.

Her body has gone taut, poised like a knife on its tip. Ben studies the line of her neck where it disappears into her scarf and remembers.

Salt on his lips, clean sweat and bare skin. The taste of her on his tongue. He tries to forget but every time he looks at her it all hits him afresh.

Her hair spilling over his hands, pooling like water between his fingers. It’s braided over one shoulder now, loose wisps curling about her ears, framing the jawline he had kissed his way along to find her lips.

It had been one of his first kisses.

Sensing his gaze, she looks up at him again.

 _You remember too,_ he thinks.

Emboldened, Ben reaches out and rests his fingertips lightly atop her left hand. When she doesn’t move to throw him off he dares more, covering her hand with his and letting his thumb drag over her knuckles.

At the contact of their bare skin the bond resonates with the tenor of her thoughts.

Out of place. She feels out of place, here, somewhere so bound to his past. She is uncertain of her own welcome in a place so closely tied to _him._

 _Why?_ Ben half-wants to ask. _You’ve laid claim to everything else of mine. My father, my mother, my inheritance. What’s an adolescent memory to all that? What more can you possibly have of me?_

It would be cruel of him, without doubt. Perhaps that’s why the impulse came to him.

Perhaps that’s why he lets it go.

(Perhaps he is just afraid of the answer.)

She is staring down at their hands with burning eyes. Ben braces himself for the inevitable recoil, his heart hovering somewhere in his throat as her fingers twitch under his, but Rey simply shifts her grip, curling her hand inward to trap his own fingers against her palm with her thumb. She holds him there, mirroring his gentle touch.

 _Where are you,_ he wants to ask a second time, but he is afraid the sound of his voice will break something. How impossibly delicate, this moment is: he can almost see the knife balancing between them on the table, roseate light quivering along the length of its blade. The slightest push one way or another and it will fall.

Rey’s shoulder brushes against one of the plants when she leans back, a creeping thing with long, spidery leaves that makes her flinch in surprise. Her other shoulder knocks into a lamp in the process and she puts up an instinctive hand to steady it, cupping the sphere of kaleidoscopic gold between her slender fingers. The warm light shimmers around her as it sways to and fro, flecks of amber and honey dancing over her skin. For a long moment Ben is lost in the radiance suffusing her entire being, until it occurs to him that this is a little _too_ much interaction with their—his—surroundings for a visitation of the Force.

Almost as if she were—real.

Their eyes meet again.

_Oh._

“You’re here,” he breathes.

Realisation flits across her face that he hadn’t known: she nods mutely, and then in a hoarse voice whispers, “yeah.”

He could touch her mouth, this close. He really could. He could reach out and just... _touch_ her mouth.

Rey turns her head and looks away.

“It’s beautiful,” she says again.

 _You’re beautiful,_ trips on his tongue. It wouldn’t be a lie to say so, but then he thinks of the knife, and the shadows under her eyes that tell him she’s as tired as he is, and he can’t do it.

He couldn’t bear it, if he ruined this moment somehow. If he drove her away.

“Why come here tonight?” Rey asks after a moment.

Their hands are still linked. Slowly, Ben draws his thumb over her knuckles again, mapping the dips between the bones where the skin is softer than the rest.

Rey is fascinated by his hands. She’s never been coy about it, but it means he doesn’t often have the opportunity to study her own this way. They’re finer than his, compact and strong, the backs of her hands dusted with freckles and an uneven tan that fades out at her wrists. He turns her palm over and her breath catches when he begins to trace the lines there with trembling fingers.

To be no one, he thinks.

“To be alone,” he says aloud.

It’s his turn to lose his breath to the blazing look on her face. It’s _intoxicating,_ being this near her: his head is swimming like he’s been sipping whisky all night and yet his mind has never been clearer as he leans toward her, just a little, just enough that he can see the greenish flecks in her irises and the faint flush of pink staining her cheeks.

“Do you want to be alone?” Her voice is steady enough, but Ben’s thumb is resting against her wrist now and the rapid flutter of the pulse there gives her away. He leans in further, his gaze shifting down to her lips as his hands slip further up her arms.

“No.”

\- 

Nur and her mother live in the apartment above the teashop, reached by exiting through the back and climbing the staircase in the little courtyard beyond. Ben had first set foot there as a yawning, mop-haired nine-year-old, after the resulting crash from the strong caf Mehru served had struck him like a hammer between the eyes and—rather than make Leia and Evaan cut their evening short—he had taken up their hostess’ offer of a nap and blissfully lost consciousness amid the soft blue sheets of her spare bedroom.

At the nod from Nur, reclined on her cushioned throne, this is where he leads Rey now.

-

The rain is the first thing Ben notices, when the door closes behind them and the shadows envelope them both.

Actually, no: the first thing is Rey, shedding her jacket and scarf as she steps forward into the room, slinging them over the end of the bed and turning to face him in a sleeveless shirt and loose combat pants of indeterminate colour, sturdy boots wrapped around her lower legs. The _second_ thing he notices is the sound of the rain against the room’s lone window, the neon lights and sounds of the Kassiani district muffled by the fogged transparisteel. It’s a different world from where he and Rey stand, silent now, in the dark.

The bedroom is small, not much more than the bed and a little storage chest. There’s just enough illumination to see by filtering in from outside, runnels of watery light blurring Rey’s features and painting her in shades of smoke and lavender and faded, crepuscular gold.

Her eyes glitter in the dim glow of the streetlamps. She’s smiling.

Ben is lost.

Slowly, he lifts his hands to rest them on her shoulders. He takes a step forward, she takes one back, and like this he guides her backward until her calves meet the edge of the bed and he can push her, gently, carefully, to sit there. His eyes stay fixed on hers all the while, watching for something—anything that isn’t an affirmation to proceed. He’s contemplating his next move when Rey’s right hand comes up to wrap around his wrist, her thumb rubbing lightly along the bone.

She is fine, the little touch assures him: she is at her ease, and it fills him with a tenuous kind of wonder to receive her trust like this, her patience and her curiosity as she waits to see what he does next. It makes him _happy._

She’s happy too. Ben can feel it, an uncomplicated warmth that laps over the bond like waves. It’s impossible to keep the smile from creeping over his face to feel how content she is, how his presence has become a source of comfort to her. It is a new experience, to bring someone peace. All he wants is to touch her, to devour her, to get lost in her and never find his way out again. To stay here, where the world will never find them.

Her other hand comes up to settle at his hip, anchoring him.

“You’re here,” he says again.

Rey’s head tilts to one side, regarding him. “Yeah,” she gives his wrist a squeeze, “right here.” She waggles her eyebrows playfully, and Ben feels her mind brush invitingly over his.

Her meaning is clear.

_What are you going to do about it?_


	2. Chapter 2

The light of dawn finds them in much the same position as the night before had left them.

Ben has fallen sideways from where he’d been propped up against the wall, which means that Rey’s head is no longer resting in his lap but pillowed on the softest part of his stomach, but little else has changed. His hands are still buried in her silky hair; the sound of her breathing still soothes him, and though their current state is one of innocent repose his mind and body are threatening to betray him.

It doesn’t help that she’s sprawled across his lower half, having worked her way between his splayed legs to fall asleep with his abdomen as a cushion. It doesn’t _help_ that she’s warm, and soft, and frustratingly wriggly, or that her breasts are pressed so perfectly against his groin and shift every time she breathes...

No. Rey absolutely isn’t helping matters, but she is asleep, so for once at least she’s not doing it on purpose.

Probably.

 

-

 

_What are you going to do about it?_

Her voice in his mind is teasing. Ben cups her cheek. “You feel like a dream.”

“A good dream?” Rey nuzzles into his palm, her eyes still on his. Ben moves his free hand to her head and threads his fingers deep into her chestnut hair.

“Couldn’t say.”

That earns him a nip from sharp teeth to the soft swell of flesh below his thumb, followed by the lightest flicker of her tongue there. “This is real, Ben.” She reaches up to cover the hand on her face with her own. “Shall I show you?”

Slowly her knees part around his thighs, allowing him to step between them. Her hand at his hip holds him in place there, but permits him no further.

Ben wants to push against it, to chase the irresistible lure of her dark eyes that beckons him ever closer and kiss her senseless till the sun comes up. He wants to lay her out on these cool blue sheets, to cover her body with his own and discover all the ways he can make her sing.

He wants too many things to settle on a course of action now. Voiceless, Ben lets her decide.

Rey licks her lips, her gaze falling to study his belt intently. Her clever hands make quick work of tugging his shirt loose and lifting it to expose the pale skin of his stomach, the muscles of his abdomen tensing under her scrutiny. Leaning in, she drops a chaste little kiss on his right hipbone.

Her smile gains a hungry edge when she glances up to gauge his reaction and finds Ben holding his breath, his body taut with anticipation. She ducks her head again and begins to tease her way along the line of his waistband, her attentions growing markedly _less_ chaste until she’s sucking open-mouthed kisses into his other hip, flicking her tongue out to taste the sensitive skin there, revelling in the rumbling groans she elicits from the giant towering over her. She waits until his eyes have fallen closed before, without warning, her touch vanishes.

Ben’s eyes fly open at the loss of her, only to find her kneeling on the bed with her shirt already halfway over her head and—

His jaw goes slack.

She’s not wearing anything underneath.

Tossing the garment aside, Rey leans back on her elbows, naked from the waist up. It’s no striptease, not that Ben has much (which is to say, any) experience with those: undressing for her is a perfunctory business, just a matter of getting herself naked as quickly as she can, but somehow it arouses him all the more. She _wants_ to be bare, to feel his eyes and his hands and his mouth on her; Ben can feel it as surely as his own need to look and touch and taste, to slip inside and bury himself where she’ll never get him out.

And apparently, he’s taking too long about it. With a wicked smile Rey hooks a leg around his thigh and hauls him toward her, a startled wheeze leaving Ben as he unbalances and comes toppling down onto her. The mattress groans at the impact: she snickers and wraps her arms around his neck to pull him closer.

“Fighting dirty, Madam Jedi?” Ben murmurs, bending to nibble at her throat. The urge takes him to bite a little harder, to see how long it takes to bring that streak of wildness in her to the surface, but after last time Rey wouldn’t thank him for marking her so visibly.

(Last time he had been a little too enthusiastic and left a rather embarrassing pink splodge right under her jaw. It had been the first time he’d ever had a woman seat herself in his lap and kiss the living daylights out of him, in his defence, but she hadn’t been terribly impressed by the souvenir.)

Ben remembers the scarf she was wearing tonight, and lets his teeth scrape just a touch more firmly over her skin.

“I’ll fight fair when you do, _Lord Ren,”_ Rey rakes her fingers deliciously over his scalp, pulling another groan from him becauses that’s—oh, that’s a low blow all on its own. She only ever calls him _Lord Ren_ with a heavy dose of irony but she knows, she _knows_ how much he likes it.

(More importantly, she only ever calls him that when she’s in a very good mood indeed.)

“You’re a monster,” he mutters, kissing a path down to her breasts and letting his head just...rest there, for a little while, mouthing at her sternum. She’s so soft, and the rise and fall of her chest is so steady under his lips. Maybe he could stay here. Maybe she would let him live here, if he was good. He can be good.

“Yes, I am,” she replies drowsily.

 

-

 

He had planned on working her up into a fever state, kissing her wherever he could reach, sucking on her tits until she whimpered and sobbed and pushed his head away—at which point he’d work his way between her lovely long thighs and kiss her there too, teasing her relentlessly until she cried his name and broke over him like a long-awaited summer storm. Then, when she was soft and sated and limp and unable to do much more than meet his kisses, he would gather her up in his arms and bear her away to his ship before either of them could return to their senses and—

—and it’s a pretty dream, but a dream nonetheless.

What happens, in reality, is that Ben slides to his knees beside the bed and sets himself to unlacing Rey’s boots. He presses his forehead to her knee so she can feel the uneven hitch in his breath, dizzy with the thought that he’s _undressing_ her, and then he’s rising to his feet to help her kick her trousers off.

His own clothes follow and he crawls back over her to find her lips once more. She receives him with open arms and a sleepy sigh, bringing her knees up to frame his hips.

Minutes might pass, lost to kissing her; it might be hours, for all Ben is aware of time’s passing as he slips his hand between her legs and finds the place that makes her turn to liquid gold beneath him, and when suddenly her lips aren’t touching his anymore and she’s pressing her face into his neck to muffle her cries it still isn’t nearly time enough. There needs to be more—more time, more _her,_ more of the way her body looks in the rain-blurred dark, the way her eyes glint when she works her way down between his thighs to ruin him with her mouth, the way she tastes like _him_ when she kisses him after; like him and just the faintest bit like tea.

There needs to be a future made of days and weeks and unbroken eternities of nothing but Rey in his arms, her body curled against his all sinewy muscle and sharp elbows and callused skin, and those little hidden spots of softness at her breasts and her belly and the baby-smooth insides of her thighs he wonders if he alone has seen.

Maybe it isn’t theirs, that future, but maybe in another universe it could be.

 

-

 

Her lips are on his skin, gentle and burning-hot. All of her is hot, Ben realises: it’s like a furnace in here with the window closed and this lithe desert creature wrapped around him. He reaches out with the Force but there’s a latch holding it shut, too fiddly for his want-addled mind to handle.

“You’re so tired.” The sensation of Rey’s lips moving against his throat makes him shiver. “I can feel it.”

 _Is that all you can feel?_ Ben wants to tease, mostly to try and divert her from the exhaustion clinging to his bones, but the words don’t make it out in time.

Rey pulls back, looking him directly in the eyes. “Do you ever sleep?”

“Do you?” he retorts without thinking. Her face falls just a fraction, and Ben clenches his fists so tightly his nails dig into the skin.

The pain is nothing he does not deserve.

Reluctantly, he peels himself away from Rey and stalks over to the window. The night air is cool on his face when he shoves it open, and fresh enough so long as he breathes through his mouth. The window isn’t big enough to lean out of, but he can see out over the little courtyard to the darkened apartments on the other side, and beyond to the steaming rooftops of the city.

From this angle it looks even more like a maze, all roads leading back to the central core at Kafrene’s heart. This world was made for the lost, Ben thinks. For those going nowhere, and with nowhere to go.

His arousal well and truly banked, he latches the window ajar and turns back to face the room.

Rey sits on the end of the bed. Her back is to him; her shoulders are tight with tension, her hands curled in her lap. Her mind is guarded, both giving him space and claiming some for herself.

Guilt swimming uneasily in his stomach, Ben crosses the room again to sink onto the bed beside her, letting the wall take his weight as he pulls her gently back into his arms.

 _Forgive me._ Those words won’t come either. He kisses the top of her head and wonders if it would be better if he couldn’t speak at all.

There were days when he couldn’t, when he was younger. Sometimes it was by his own choosing. Sometimes it was not.

Time blurs around the edges. The next thing he is aware of is Rey extricating herself from him. He closes his eyes, unable to watch her walk away again.

A weight settles over his thighs, and Ben looks down to find her blinking up at him from his lap. She’s not smiling; her expression is too brittle for that. Still, there is tenderness there.

“I sleep more than I used to,” she says in a quiet voice.

Something pangs in his chest.

“Good.” Ben dips down to kiss the corner of her mouth, and it is the most natural thing in the world to weave his fingers into her hair again. _I’m sorry,_ he tells her with the unpracticed gentleness of his hands.

 _I know,_ she replies with the guileless want in her lips.

At length, reluctantly, he pulls away from her, nudging her nose with his and dropping a kiss on the tip. “Sleep, Rey,” Ben murmurs.

She mumbles something unintelligible in response, turning her head into his stomach. Already he can feel her fading but it’s different now that she’s here, more than an illusion. More than a dream. For once, he isn’t worried that he will wake and she’ll be gone.

 _You rest too, Ben,_ Rey thinks. _Stay with me._

 _Of course,_ he strokes her hair. _I’m not going anywhere, Rey, I promise._

He thinks she sleeps, after that, but just as he’s hovering on the edge of unconsciousness he hears one last thought, spoken through the Force.

_I know._

 

-

 

This wouldn’t be the worst way to pass forever, drowsing in the early morning light with Rey draped over him like a blanket, albeit one made of elbows, but eventually, woken by an old instinct, she stirs.

“Where’s your shirt?”

Her speech is muffled, her lips moving ticklishly against his abdomen. She is virtually facedown on his bare stomach, so he supposes it’s a valid question, but still—

“Where’s yours?” Ben mumbles, one hand slipping out of her hair and down over her back to remind her that he isn’t the only mostly-naked one in this bed. He follows the slight curve of her spine as far as he can and when he can go no further begins to caress his way back up again, his touch becoming just the lightest _brush_ of fingertips as he reaches the sensitive underside of her breast.

“Hmph,” Rey shifts onto her elbows and glowers down at him. “Good morning to you too.”

Ben smirks at her, a wondrous realisation striking him. “You’re _grumpy_ when you wake up.”

“What? I am not.”

“You _are_ ,” he wraps his other arm around her waist to hold her against him because she’s still wriggling, and with most of her weight settled between his legs it’s having all sorts of adverse effects on his lower body.

“So what?” Rey grouses, letting herself be drawn further up his chest and onto safer ground. He isn’t naïve enough to imagine she hadn’t felt his morning eagerness pressed up against her, but if he can keep her distracted...

“Nothing.” An idea strikes him as to how he can divert her attention. The hand beneath her right breast moves a little, enough that he can get at her nipple with his fingers, and Ben revels in the way her eyes darken as he rolls it under his thumb.

Then they go narrow in suspicion.

“Are you trying to soften me up?” Rey asks, rolling her hips into him and erasing any doubt in Ben’s mind that she had felt his—well, _him,_ hot and full between her thighs. Her blunt nails press gently into his chest. “You know that doesn’t work.”

Ben moves one hand to her hip, the other lingering at her breast. She has such pretty tits: he wants to get his mouth on them properly since he didn’t get the chance last night. “Do I?” He pinches her nipple between finger and thumb and watches her lashes flutter, her lips parting on a sigh. “I think it might.”

“In your dreams.”

“Very much,” he grins, “I like you soft.”

Rey snorts loudly. “That’s a shame,” she says, pressing her lips to the firm muscle of his chest, _I like you hard._

Spluttering in scandalised amusement, Ben responds by digging his thumbs into her sides until she shrieks and bucks up in his arms, pinning her in place as she writhes because oh, Rey of Jakku is ticklish and he might just treasure this discovery for the rest of his _life_.

The flat of her hand connects with his solar plexus and Ben releases her with a wheeze; his hands fall to her hips again as she shoves herself upright and when he opens his eyes she’s grinning down at him, breathless and stark naked and flushed with laughter.

 _I like you here,_ he thinks.

 

-

 

He’s kissing her like his life depends on it, absentmindedly circling her hipbones with his thumbs when Rey’s stomach gives an audible rumble. She breaks away with a snort and rests her forehead against his.

Ben moves his hand to her lower abdomen, flattening his palm there and pressing down the way he’s discovered she likes. “Hungry?”

“Always,” she rocks her hips into his hand. “I was going to eat when I got back.”

The thought of _going back_ puts an immediate dampener on his mood. He hates that she can bring it up so easily, that she is already planning for her departure, but then her mind moves over his like she’s trying to climb inside him and he feels it—how little she wants to move from here, how she wishes it could always be this simple.

Ben pushes aside the bitterness that comes with knowing that all they’ll ever have is stolen time. “Or you could—we could—eat downstairs. At Mehru’s. It’s good.”

Her eyes light up at the mention of food. “It’s Alderaanian?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” she chews her lip. “I probably won’t get another chance to try it any time soon.”

Ben shrugs. “Maybe not.” _Not while you’re hiding in the Outer Rim, you won’t._

Rey is very very good at spinning somewhat flimsy excuses into plausible arguments. “And I should save my onboard rations for when I actually need them...”

“Smart.” Ben’s hand slips lower until his thumb can brush lightly over her clit through her underwear. She shivers, chasing his touch with her shifting hips.

Drawing her nails over his chest, she continues, “and I did want to do some exploring while I was here.”

 _Me too,_ thinks Ben, as his gaze wanders down her body. Rey skewers him with an unimpressed look.

“Really?”

He smiles, uncaring of the way the expression shows off his crooked teeth and emphasises his uneven features—made all the uglier by the scar that wends its way across his face. She’s never cared that he’s ugly, even though she is the most beautiful creature he’s ever seen. She’s never minded that he’s marked.

(The way she looks at him sometimes, he suspects she rather likes it.)

“So, breakfast? Or…” Ben trails off, quirking his eyebrows suggestively as he toys with the edge of her underwear, “...breakfast?”

There’s a moment’s pause, and then Rey’s mouth falls open and she lets out a snort that dissolves into unbridled laughter, the motion of it sending delicious tremors through her body to where she’s pressed against him. Ben marks it down as a rare victory—he’s all too used to her bawdy humour making him blush like a schoolboy, the way she only has to _look_ at him sometimes to make him stumble over his own tongue.

It’s not often he gets to scandalise her back.

Eventually, Rey composes herself, and when she looks up at him again there's mischief in her eyes.

“What if I want both?”


End file.
